The Red Room SYOC
by sinders-and-ash
Summary: I am one of 28 young ballerinas with the Bolshoi. Training is hard, but the glory of the Soviet culture, and the warmth of my parents… my… parents… makes up for…. no… that's not right… I am one of 28 Black Widows with the Red Room. Training is hard, but the glory of the Soviet supremacy, and the warmth of my parents…. all my parents…. makes up for… I can't remember. SYOC, open!
1. one of twenty eight

**i am one of twenty eight young ballerinas with the b** **olshoi. training is hard, but the glory of the soviet culture, and the warmth of my parents… my… parents… makes up for….**

 **no… that's not right…**

 **i am one of twenty eight black widows with the red room. training is hard, but the glory of the soviet supremacy, and the warmth of my parents…. all my parents…. makes up for…**

 **you'll have to excuse me. i don't know what's happening.**

 **who are you?**

* * *

 _"You'll break them."_

You hear the girl with hair like blood speak but it is as though she is veiled, speaking from an insurmountable distance. She is foreign to you, this girl with pale skin and brown eyes, but you know her because she is you. You are both widows. You are both spiders. You dance to the same tune.

You dance now. You always do. You bring your limbs in close and you spin. The world is a sightless blur of colourless grey, and you are aware that you are one of two dozen, moving in perfect synch, with perfect grace. This is what it means to be a widow.

 _"Only the breakable ones."_

Who does the madam speak of? Not you. You are not breakable. You are strong - steel and iron in your bones, heart, lungs. You will not break. Not like the others.

 _"You are made of marble."_

Yes. Marble. Marble and iron and steel. You are nothing else. You are nothing. You are not.

You have no place in this world.

The dance continues.

* * *

It is nineteen eighty seven and the winter has been cruel to Stalingrad. Frosted in the lazy calligraphy of new ice, the lights of the city burn a pale fire through the darkness. That is all they can see from their dormitory windows, the Wolf Spiders and Black Widows, the children they call killers. They can only see the pale stars of the city, far from the facility, and beyond that, the darkness.

this is their story. The story of the orphans who could have burned the world to she's if they so chose. The story of the girls trained for a war that never began, of the boys for whom killing was as natural as bleeding. The children who learned to breathe smoke and drink venom, the orphans who became ghosts, invisible to the world.

This is the story of how they became Black Widows and Wolf Spiders, and what happened to them afterwards. This is not a story with a happy ending.

* * *

 **Please PM the form! It can also be found on my profile. The most detailed submissions shall be the ones accepted - I am only accepting three main girls and three main guys! They should be between thirteen and nineteen years old.**

Name:

Wolf Spider or Black Widow?:

Age:

Appearance:

Personality:

Family:

History:

Unusual talents:

Other:


	2. rat's alley

**The story is still _open_** **and accepting characters! Just to keep you interested, here is a short piece introducing the first two main characters - Liha Novokova and Nadia Volkova. If you want your character to be accepted, please, _please_ leave a review so that I know how to improve - the more detailed, the better!**

* * *

 **1986**

Poor Olga -

She was one of the breakable ones.

And she had broken.

When the older Widow found her, she was singing, softly, to herself. They had locked her in a small room, the _odinochka_ \- two feet by two feet, Nadia had known it well as a girl - and they had beaten her, subjected her to _plet'_ , the lashings, and threatened her with worse with a self-assurance that spoke of long experience. Nadia had never seen a girl with her nostrils slit or the skin burned from her face - certainly, it would go against the Red Room's entire purpose, to create invisible girls of smoke and ghostlight - but in the moment, your skin burning from the _rozga_ and your legs shaking beneath you from terror and lack of sleep, the detail was easy to overlook.

Olga's tune was sweet - her words, macabre. Nadia had never heard the song before, but that meant little.

" _They're not your friends, they all want to sell your blood_ \- Isn't that why everybody signs up? _So keep your singin' voice golden, keep your red shoes on_. _Run, darling, run. Run, darling, run. Run, darling -"_

She paused, abruptly, spotting the dark-haired teenager lingering at the edge of the studio. A dozen mirrors reflected a refracted, broken version of Nadia back at herself - her eyes, as sharp as scalpels, blazed from a golden face framed by stray strands of ebony hair, wispily escaping from the otherwise perfectly coiffed bun shared by all Widows in the Room during training. They wore long hair, because that was easy to change - one could always cut her hair short, shave her head, and thus change her entire appearance, but one couldn't exactly make it grow. It was a case of practicality. Nadia liked that, the practical nature behind every decision at the Room.

"Can you hear the screaming?" Olga's voice was very gentle.

Nadia was prepared to agree mindlessly, anything to ease the other girl's tense, frightened voice, but was surprised to find that she was not lying - she _could_ hear the screaming. No, screaming was the wrong word - this was a softer sound, quieter, pitiable. A gasping for breath, a moan, in one of the small rooms that lined the long, dark concrete hallways of the facility. She stepped closer to Olga, a single stride across the polished floorboards that took her further from that awful sound, and said, "They're just making her perfect, Olishka. Like you and I. We're being made perfect."

Sometimes, you needed to set a broken bone so that it would heal correctly. The Red Room dealt in broken bones.

 _"See after all, it's a crazy dream, dorogaja, and all the good cards burn up in a flash..."_ She turned, a quick chaîné of wheaten hair and blurred limbs. " _Oh, my, my, it's getting late, Zolushka -_ _How long before these dresses turn right back to rags?_ They're going to kill me, Nadia. I know. _Run, darling, run, and don't stop - leave the broken glass behind, Zolushka, it'll only make you bleed. Run, darling, run, we're nothing but broken things and -"_

She stopped, abruptly. "It's time for dinner," she said. "You should go."

Nadia missed nothing, not with those dark eyes of hers. "Olishka." She hesitated. She was not close to the other girl, but they were two facets of the same diamond, two sides to the same gold coin. Olga was a reflection of Nadia in a cracked mirror - nearly the same, but not quite. "Не стоит забывать." The girl was right. She was awaiting her death, here in this ballet studio that still echoed of the faint strains of music and the violent movements of the dance. She was _dokhodiaga_. And Nadia had no interest in getting involved. "Мы будем совершенными."

"Nadia." A voice at the door turned her head. Another widow, Katiya, stood there, her pale face set and unhappy. She held a revolver in her hand, looked beyond Nadia, to the girl in the mirror. "It's time for dinner," she said. "You should go."

Nadia nodded. "Of course, _tovarisch vdova_."

She did not glance again at Olga, merely turned to go, and left the broken, breakable girl behind. It wasn't so bad for Nadia. She knew how these things were. She was ten years old, after all - five years in the Red Room had taught her well.

The other widow who had been making that awful sound had fallen silent now as Nadia went into the hallway and walked towards the small canteen where they would be served their dinner. It was silent, utterly, despite the mass of humanity within - the Room so often was.

She couldn't help but glance into the open door of one of the rooms as she passed. She regretted it, of course - they had one of the unfamiliar girls, the _prizraki,_ on the gurney, her hand hanging over the side like she was dead. They were cutting her open, two dark-haired male scientists Nadia didn't know, but the _prizrak_ 's eyes followed Nadia as she flitted past the door. The _prizrak_ had grey hair and dark eyes, and blood on her face. They were empty, those dark, dark eyes. That was what it meant to be a _prizrak_.

There was only one Red Room, and they trained only the widows. But Nadia had heard the rumours throughout the school - of the existence of a corresponding academy for boys, where they trained the male assassins and spies. And, of course, they kept the monsters, the _prizraki_ , under the floor.

She shook the thoughts from her head like so many cobwebs. To survive here, you concerned yourself with only what concerned you - no more and no less. With that thought, Nadia's mind turned to the important things in life - food and ballet - and if she heard the muffled gunshots in the studio behind her as imperfect, broken Olga was put to rest, well, she gave no indication.

* * *

 **1992**

The chair Madam Belikova sat in, like a burnished throne, glowed on the marble, where the glass held up by standards wrought with fruited vines from which a golden Cupidon peeped out (another hid his eyes behind his wing) doubled the flames of seven-branched candelabra reflecting light upon the table as the glitter of her jewels rose to meet it, from satin cases poured in rich profusion.

 _"Speak to me."_

Iin vials of ivory and coloured glass unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes, unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused and drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air that freshened from the window, these ascended in fattening the prolonged candle-flames, flung their smoke into the laquearia, stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.

 _"Why do you never speak?"_

Huge sea-wood fed with copper burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone, in which sad light a carvéd eagle swam. Above the antique mantel was displayed as though a window gave upon the sylvan scene the change of Philomel, by the barbarous king so rudely forced; yet there the nightingale filled all the desert with inviolable voice and still she cried, and still the world pursues, the widow's song to dirty ears.

" _Speak._ "

And other withered stumps of time were told upon the walls; staring forms leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.

" _What are you thinking of?"_

Footsteps shuffled on the stair. The building was awake with shadows and monsters; the hallways, they echoed and groaned.

 _"I never know what you are thinking."_

Under the firelight, under the brush, the madam's hair spread out in fiery points, glowed into words, then would be savagely still. Her tongue was a knife hungry for blood, and it slashed out mocking words with a violence.

" _Think_."

She thought they were in rats' alley where the dead men lost their bones.

What was that noise? The wind under the door. What was that noise now? What was the wind doing? Nothing again nothing.

 _"Do you know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember nothing?"_

She remembered those are pearls that were his eyes. She remembered dying.

 _"Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?"_

No. Nothing, nothing. She had no place in this world. She was nothing.

 _"Shall we play a game of chess, pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door?"_

She had no tongue to speak with. If she had, what would she say? She angles her face towards the lone window in the room, and watches faraway stars. What is the city over the mountains, that cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air? Falling towers - Jerusalem Athens Nanjing Alexandria Vienna London Stalingrad Bucharest home home home.

The stars were wreathed in charcoal clouds, and faded now, choked in grey. Everything was grey: her hair, his smoke, the sky. She'd spent so long devoid of color she didn't know what it meant anymore. Here, in the Room, there existed two colours in their extremities: red and grey.

Liha Novokova, her hands dark with ash and gasoline and her face smeared with blood, was not a stranger to either.

* * *

 _Ruzga. _**Birch cane.**

 _Не стоит забывать. _**Don't forget**.

 _Мы будем совершенными. _**We'll be perfect.**

 _Dokhodiaga. _**A goner.**

 _Prizrak._ **A ghost.**

 _Tovarisch._ **Comrade.**

 _Vdova. _**Widow.**


	3. end of the world

**The story is still _open_** **and accepting characters! However, only one more girl and two more boys may be accepted, so make your submissions as good as they can be! Just to keep you interested, here is a short piece introducing the next main characters - Katiya Antonovich and Misha Poltinnikov. If you want your character to be accepted, please, _please_ leave a review so that I know how to improve - the more detailed, the better!**

 **As a quick note - this story will take place in three different time periods, each one running alongside the next with characters fading in and out depending on their importance to that plot. The first, 1989, will tell the story of a group of new recruits; the second, set in 1991, will show the training for graduation of another group of wolves and widows; the third, set in 1993, will follow a group of agents on their first mission. Whether a character will survive from one setting to the next cannot be certain until you encounter them - although each time will focus on a different group, other protagonists will appear in the background. Other flashbacks and flash forwards shall be interspersed to add background, context, hints and flesh out relationships. If you guys have anything in particular you want to see more or less of, sound off in the reviews!**

* * *

 **1991**

Here is no water but only rock -

Rock and no water and the sandy road winding above among the mountains, which are mountains of rock without water.

If there were water they should stop and drink - but amongst the rock one cannot stop or think.

If there were only water amongst the rock.

Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit. Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit. There is not even silence in the mountains, but dry sterile thunder without rain.

There is not even solitude in the mountains, but pale sullen faces sneer and snarl from the constellations of frost upon the path.

If there were water -

And no rock -

If there were rock -

And also water -

And water -

A spring... a pool among the rock...

If there were the sound of water only. Not the cicada, and dry grass singing, but sound of water over a rock where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees: drip drop drip drop drop drop drop

But there is no water.

This is the mind of a wolf.

* * *

 **1989**

The first English sentence Anastasia Smirnova learned in the Room was a declaration of defiance and pride. She was five years old, and could still taste the smoke of her home burning to the ground with her family inside.

Shoulder to shoulder with twenty seven other girls, they spoke as one: _I am one of twenty eight young ballerinas with the Bolshoi._

A pause, as though to allow those words make their full impact.

And then: _training is hard, but the glory of the soviet culture, and the warmth of my parents, makes up for any temporary hardship I must endure._

Finally: _What breaks heals stronger. I will be remade. I will be perfect._

* * *

 **1991**

The first time Katiya ever saw a wolf, she was fifteen years old and his name was Misha Poltinnikov.

He was the first wolf she ever saw, but he was followed quickly by a second, his brother Ilya, and then by a third and a fourth and a fifth as the wolf spiders filed past the door in twin columns of fourteen. The date was the twenty eighth of December, and the world was ending.

One of the instructors had arrived to the Room that day with red around her eyes, like she had been weeping in private; her voice had been as neutral, as lacking in emotion, as it ever had been, as she announced that the war they had been training to fight was about to dawn upon them. Their empire had fallen - the Union had dissolved - but the widows and the wolves were ready for their orders, whatever came next. Whatever snakes had clung to the sorry vestiges of their former power, they still had an army loyal to them, an army of children and killers, and that army stood ready.

The world ending was not to be considered an excuse to deviate from schedule, Madam announced. And so, the girls were in their classroom watching the evil queen gazing deep into her magic mirror and reciting her lines in the flawless English of the born American when Katiya spied the wolf. He was pale, with dark hair; his brother was identical to him. They wore red and grey, like the widows. She didn't know why she found that odd. But she did.

She caught only a glimpse, and then he was gone and she turned back to the screen just in time to accompany the queen's ultimatum: " _But to make doubly sure you do not fail_ ," Katiya intoned, and tried not to think of Zvetlana and Marta and Olga and all the other dead girls under the ground, " _bring back her heart_."

They usually ate lunch after English drills, and today was not allowed to be an exception. Masha Zalesky waited by the door for Katiya; her eyes, flecked with green, were cold, without friendship or warmth as she watched the other girl walk over. She was Katiya's _dvoynik_ ; they were one another's shadows, and inseparable, but this was not an arrangement borne of spontaneous affection. Masha was Katiya's watchdog, and Katiya hers, assigned a friendship and obliged to carry it out, scrutinising the other girl always for signs of disloyalty. Their beds bordered each other; they ate lunch at the same table, danced side by side, stretched and fought and ran together, waiting, always waiting, for the other to slip up, to make a mistake and get themselves killed.

Masha was not Katiya's first _dvoynik_. That had been Zvetlana. But Zvetlana was dead now, so Masha had been put into the dead girl's bed and the dead girl's chair and told to adopt her partner as her own. Katiya didn't know what had happened to Masha's first shadow, or if she had even had one.

Masha certainly never volunteered the story. She was usually silent, especially today, on the day the world ended, as she and Katiya walked to the canteen. The younger widows, the newer generations, still marched to and from class in tight columns of fourteen and fourteen, arranged with military discipline and precision. But Katiya's class had proven themselves loyal; now they operated with _dvoyniki_ and cameras and if that wasn't enough to keep a girl in check, well, the other widows would turn on her instantly as one with dubious character and questionable loyalty. That was known.

Lunch was, as it usually was, a small tin bowl of okroshka, a bland soup of raw vegetables, boiled potato, fish, and kvas. That was normal enough - sometimes there was black bread or fresh vegetables, but rarely, rarely. The Red Room thrived on discipline, and Katiya had known these dishes since she was a child - for breakfast, kasha, for lunch, okroshka, for dinner, fish and rice and if they were fortunate, a mug of warm tea with a dash of milk, just enough to lighten the brown colour to beige. She took her dish, and, keeping her gaze firmly fixed on the liquid within, took her seat. Socialising was discouraged, but not forbidden; she rather thought the Room's operatives liked to see the way the young widows played each other, manipulated each other, vied for survival in an intricate dance of oblique implications and allusions. But Katiya rarely had the patience for such activities, and Masha rarely spoke enough to indulge, so the two began to eat in silence, barely looking up even as they were joined by Nadia Volokova and the blind girl, Jade.

Nadia said, "did you see the wolves?"

Katiya had seen the wolves, and she nodded so. "Да," she said simply, moving her spoon around the bowl.

Jade said, "they're here for graduation."

Katiya nodded, slowly. Yes, she had guessed as much. The existence of the Red Room's male counterpart had always been an open secret; although the widows and the wolves never crossed paths and rarely saw even signs of the other's existence, they came together at their graduation exams, an event that tended to kill as many as it passed. She knew little about them, the wolves, and she didn't think she wanted to. They had seemed sure of themselves, she thought; confident.

Of course, some of the widows were confident as well. Little Oksana, with her misleadingly golden hair and poisonous bright eyes; Masha, with her silent poise and deadly movements; Anastasia, who was always underestimated until the moment it was too late.

Masha said, "what use is graduation now?" and Katiya cast a hasty glance around the canteen to ensure no instructor had heard as Nadia assumed a pensive expression before speaking in measured words.

"Oh," she said. "Our world isn't ending, Mariska. Not yet. We still haven't fought our war."

Masha looked down at her bowl and said nothing. But Nadia was wrong, Katiya thought - the world was ending, the world was ending, the world was ending. The USSR had dissolved; their empire was crumbling around them. And silently, she thought that this graduation ceremony might be the Red Room's last.

* * *

 **1993**

The train sped by, clickaclickclack on its rails, rattling and shuddering as though it were about to tear itself apart and the girl in the white dress put her bag on her knees and pulled two hammers from its depths. Claw hammers, yellow handled and rusted, and her hands met them like old friends.

The metro stations of Moscow were opulent cages of mosaics and glittering chandeliers, but here in the dark depths of the subway tunnels, total dark eclipsed the shadowed glass of the windows. The girl in the white dress looked back at her own reflection, and put her hands down at her side. She had very dark hair, and very dark eyes. Long eyelashes, like thorns, jagged, threatened to scar.

She was _prizrak_.

At this hour of night, the train was quiet. An old babushka leafed lazily through an old broadsheet opposite her, crow's feet spreading across her temples like a blight. A young woman, blonde and pretty, dressed like a waitress fresh from a late shift, gazed idly across the carriage. A man dressed like an accountant shifted his weight and glared at the papers in his hand; a pair of red-haired teenagers with bright neon bands on their arms put their heads together and giggled.

The brakes of the train shrieked a goodbye, and the train skidded into a sudden stop.

The girl in the white dress rose. Her reflection looked almost waifish - the dark green combat jacket she wore over the sundress was several sizes too large. She looked ragged, torn, but not lost, not uncertain. She knew what she was doing. Her dress was closer to grey than white, anyway.

She stepped off the train, and risked a glanced back at it. The young woman, the waitress, was watching her with cold eyes.

One widow recognises another. The girl in the white dress felt something under her ribs that was close to apprehension. Found again, and so soon. She had hoped to make it out of Russia before they came for her. To make it to Bucharest, at least. Budapest. Further west - Warsaw, Prague. Out of the Room's reach.

But the Room dealt in spiders, and their tangled webs infected every corner of the world.

The station she had chosen was dark, far from the opulence of the city centre. A few blue lighting strips illuminated a few sparse metres, interspersed by patches of gloom. Several of these dark spaces separated the girl in the white dress from the stairs towards the sky, and the men that stood in front of them.

They were not wolves, these men, who stood about half a dozen strong although it was too dark to be certain. If they were wolves, she would have been cold and bloodless by now. No, these were ordinary men, and they would die the second they took a step towards her.

They took a step towards her. The hammers rose and the ghost in the girl's skin moved with a violence.

The first punch was easily dodged, swinging low under his reach even as she spun and embedded the claw of one tool into the tender flesh above his shirt collar. No sooner had she avoided his first move than a second man was coming, and a third, and the girl became a maelstrom, her blood like mercury in her veins. Up came her foot and down went her heel, a solid connect with the second's knee and she used that momentum to push herself up into the air and down again with a punch that snapped the third's head back and allowed her to turn low under his arm and knock his legs out from under him. The hammers spun in her hand, and spun in an arc as she did, hooking another's arm as she kicked a fifth in the chest, back into the sixth who was coming fast and then she was pulling back, pulling one with her, and she pulled her hammer free with such a strength that she heard bone break and swung the weapon until she saw blood and turned it in her hand so sharp edge faced outwards and used it as a knife, cutting, cutting, cutting.

Seven men. She had them counted now.

She caught one of them with the hook of the hammer and pulled him down, down, down, in front of her, dirty blood falling, and she made sure he stayed down with two sharp blows of the hammers. She spun away again, swift and graceful, and spun, and spun, and spun herself into a butterfly kick that sent another man backwards into the pillar right before she had to catch the third by his wrist before his punch could connect and kicked his leg which such force that the bone bent and broke and she threw him over her shoulder and onto the ground.

The last was walking towards her, and she ran to meet him. Her legs were strong - they carried her, across the floor and into the air, and she landed with her knees at his throat and her fingers intertwined as she brought her hands down, once and then again, into his face, a smashing motion that brought blood and tears. He stumbled backwards; as though sensing he was about to fall, she allowed herself to fall backwards into a spinning flip that allowed her to land on her feet.

There was applause behind her, and the girl in the white dress turned to meet the bright eyes of the waitress from the train, the other widow.

"Tovarisch Novokova," Oksana Kerenskya said softly. Perhaps five inches shorter than the other girl, she was nonetheless confident; she held herself with a poise. "They did not exaggerate your prowess."

The girl in the white dress that was no longer white but red crouched to pick up her hammers again. The handles were slick with blood. She said nothing. Her dark eyes were very dark.

"You should come home," Oksana said, her voice persuasive. "Come home, vdova."

Up rose the hammers.

A train shrieked its arrival and the bleached white light lit up the shadows of the tunnel. Oksana turned to look - the light cast aspersions upon a pretty face.

"Are you to bring my heart back? As proof," the girl in the white dress said, as though they were thinking the same thing. Oksana smiled.

"It would be fitting," she agreed. "Wouldn't it?"

She pulled the handgun from her belt and without looking away from the train as it shuddered past in a blur of light and sound, she shot the girl in the white dress three times in the chest. The shriek of the brakes muffled the gunshots; it was difficult to tell when the girl started bleeding, so red already was her white dress.


	4. hyacinth girl

**Apologies for the long hiatus - I had exams, and then had to go abroad to stay with a sick relative. As a result, this chapter is rather fragmentary and rough, but hopefully you shall see the part it plays as the story progresses.**

 **Have a lovely day, everyone.**

* * *

 **i am one of twenty eight young ballerinas with the b** **olshoi. training is hard, but the glory of the soviet culture, and the warmth of my parents… my… parents… makes** **up for….**

 **no… that's not right…**

 **i am one of twenty eight black widows with the red room. training is hard, but the glory of the soviet supremacy, and the warmth of my parents…. all my parents…. makes up for…**

 **you'll have to excuse me. i don't know what's happening.**

 **who are you?**

* * *

April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept her warm, covering the earth in forgetful snow, feeding a little life with dried golden husks of autumn's finery. Summer surprised us, coming over Elbrus.

 _Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch._

And she was frightened. He said, Liha, Liha, into her hair, he said, Liha, Liha, hold on tight. And down they went.

In the mountains, there you feel free.

She had taken a dive on a smoky set of lies, had been so deceived and she'd been the one lying - and there was this one time when she painted a masterpiece, among other foolish things, all canvas and bleeding ink.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, you cannot say, or guess, for you know only a heap of broken images, where the sun beats, and the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, and the dry stone no sound of water. Only there is shadow under this red rock _(come in under the shadow of this red rock), a_ nd she will show you something different from either your shadow at morning striding behind you or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; she will show you fear in a handful of dust.

 _Frisch weht der Wind_

 _Der Heimat zu_

 _Mein giftig Kind,_

 _Wo weilest du?_

* * *

Oksana lowered her gun and exhaled out a breath she hadn't realised she was holding. She touched the radio on her belt, eyes not moving from the dead ghost, and spoke softly - "It's down."

* * *

 _"You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; they called me the hyacinth girl."_

—Yet when they came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, his arms full of metal, and his hair wet with blood, she could not speak, and her eyes failed, she was neither living nor dead, and she knew nothing, looking into the heart of light, the silence.

 _Otkrytyy i ochistit' more._

* * *

One of the dying men on the metro station floor stirred wuietly, mournfully, as the widow they called Oksana stepped over them. Ahead of her, the girl in the white dress lay like a corpse, dark skin slick with blood _._

* * *

Here, said she, is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,

(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)

Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, the lady of situations.

Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel, and here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card, which is blank, is something he carries on his back, which I am forbidden to see. I do not find the Hanged Man. Fear death by water. I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring. Thank you: One must be so careful these days.

The unreal frozen city, under the brown fog of a winter dawn, a crowd flowed over Anchikov Bridge, so many, she had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, and each man fixed his eyes before his feet. Flowed up the hill and down Nevsky Prospekt, spilling into Ostrovesky Square, to where old Catherine kept the hours like a dead thing keeps secrets.

She heard herself say it's gone all wrong: since when did the days and the nights get so long? And there were things that she did, just so she could feel anything - but somewhere along, something went off, and she woke up with blood on her lips. And yeah, and there were nights she just did whatever she liked... And those were the nights she was the one who woke up bleeding.

* * *

Oksana stood over the girl in the white and bloody dress, and readied her gun for the final shot into the skull.

* * *

Such was a ghost.

This was how they made the prizraki. This was how they carved them from stone - by trapping them inside their own skills with the ghosts and the thorns until their eyes bled and obscured the world from their view in rivulets of crimson and scarlet.

* * *

The dead girl on the ground, in the white dress, opened her eyes in the same moment that she moved - exploding from the ground in a violent action that took Olsana off her feet and carried her back into a grey stone pillar. What chance did Oksana have to hold into her gun when the ghost's attacks were endless - blows from fists, elbows, wrists, every surface a weapon. The hyacinth girl held her by the collar and slammed her head into the pillar and the world swayed and Oksana struggled to plant her feet on the ground again.

The ghost's forehead met her nose and that pain more than anything else propelled Oksana into action - planting her feet and throwing herself forward, twisting her shoulder until she met the prizrak's ribs and using that torque to free herself from the grip.

They traded blows - as though they were mirrored images, every move Oksana made was blocked with ease, the ghost's eyes absent, as though she were lost somewhere within herself. Her dress swayed about long dark legs. Oksana wondered why the traitor who had freed the hyacinth girl had failed to change her clothing from these, which marked her out clearl as a relic of the Red Room. Had he cred so little?

Oksana had always been one of the best in her class, but this battle was hopeless. Oksana was good, but she was human, despite all she had endured, still human - she had none of this girl's viciousness, her desperation, her casual deadliness. If she had her gun -

In the same moment she thought of this, she heard the rumble of an approaching subway train. She feinted a punch and then swept a kick at the prizrak, hard enough to knock her back - rather than pressing forward her advantage, she ran for her gun. Her pain was separate from her, like a light on the distant horizon - she could, and would, deal with it later. There, and yet absent. It did not slow her. She dropped to her knees, seized her gun, and was promptly knocked t the ground with a dizzying, deafening blow to the head. The ghost stood over her with a claw hammer.

Oksana opened her mouth to say something, to threaten, cajole, to repeat that mantra which made her a widow, but before she could speak the prizrak had seized her by the hair and dragged her, kicking, struggling, screaming sojndlessly, to the edge of the platform.

Then she threw Oksana in front of the oncoming train.


End file.
